Audiovisual Redundancy and Remediation in Ninja bugeichō

The 1950s and the 1960s saw a sudden proliferation of the term eizō (“image”) among film and media criticism in Japan. Although the term eizō is often translated as “moving image,” it also encompasses the still image medium of photography. The semantic parameter of eizō hence is much larger than the moving image. Nonetheless, it is also much more specific than the image in general. This has to do with the fundamental definition or presupposition of eizō as a mechanically produced image, mediated by technological apparatuses such as the camera and the screen. This mechanical connotation of eizō had been in place long before the 1950s. Interestingly, however, many influential critics and filmmakers, including Imamura Taihei, Matsumoto Toshio, and Okada Susumu, claim that they are the ones who first introduced or gave critical significance to this term in the 1950s.¹ In other words, there was a collective understanding among the Japanese film critics and theorists that a new definition of eizō was developed in the postwar period. This claim to newness is indeed tied up with the changing media environment, and the increased currency of this term in the 1950s and 1960s points to a symptomatic oscillation between the desire to define cinema exclusively in terms of its medium specificity and the desire to theorize cinema through its relation to other media, including television.

Consequently, the familiar paradigm of medium specificity saw a strong resurgence during this period, though concern with the specificity of cinema was inseparable from an imminent threat of its disappearance. If the semantic parameter of the word eizō shifted, as Imamura, Matsumoto, Okada, and others claim it did in the 1950s and 1960s, then it did so precisely because of the increased difficulty of isolating cinema from other forms of visual media. This was the time when cinema lost its privileged position as a hegemonic medium of the moving image and became just one type of the eizō or image-based media. Cinematic experiments of this period suggest that this concern with the medium specificity of cinema was particularly strong in the avant-garde filmmaking milieu. This essay will look at an exemplary case of such experiment undertaken by Ōshima Nagisa in the 1967 film Ninja bugeichō (Band of Ninja) in order to shed light on how this tension around the medium specificity of cinema in the age of multiple eizō or image-based media played out in actual filmmaking practice. This essay’s focus on the formal characteristics of redundancy and intermediality in Ninja bugeichō and its resonance with the theory of avant-garde documentary will complement Miryam Sas’s in-depth analysis, published in this volume, of the film’s engagement with the problematic of violence.

Intermediality and Audiovisual Redundancy

The film Ninja bugeichō premiered at the legendary Shinjuku Bunka theater in Tokyo on February 25, 1967. It was screened as a double bill with Ōshima’s earlier controversial work Night and Fog in Japan (1960, Nihon no yoru to kiri).² Based on the comic writer Shirato Sanpei’s 1959–62 gekiga with the same title, the film Ninja bugeichō is a meticulously filmed and edited version of the original gekiga that sits somewhat uncomfortably between comic book and animation. Set in the feudal era of the sixteenth century, Ninja bugeichō presents an epic narrative about a series of peasant revolts aided by an anonymous band of ninja called the “Shadow Clan” (Kage ichizoku). As the title suggests, the focus of the narrative is on the activities of this enigmatic Shadow Clan, who stealthily incite mass insurgencies against the feudal lords. Unlike mainstream manga, which caters to children, gekiga, which primarily targets a young adult readership, emphasizes dramatic (and often violent) actions and complex plot structures. This genre emerged and developed in the late 1950s as a kind of underground art form, though it quickly became commercialized. At first, promoters presented this genre as a grown-up alternative to mainstream manga.³ Shirato Sanpei was one of the leading gekiga artists who not only made this genre popular but also, in the words of Ōshima, offered...